When the Waves Turned the Minutes to Hours Quiz

NOVEMBER 9TH, 2:15 PM. -- The Edmund Fitzgerald disembarked at Superior, Wisconsin, a major dock for the shipment of "pelletized" taconite ore. Taconite pellets are dried and dehydrated to reduce their weight. The Fitzgerald was carrying 26,116 tons of taconite when it departed, enough to manufacture over 7,500 cars. The ship remains by far the largest ever to be lost on the Great Lakes, long enough to be stood on end at the point where it sank, and still reach 200 feet above the lake surface.

However, the history of Lake Superior is littered with shipwrecks and the Edmund Fitzgerald's was neither the deadliest (that would be the Lady Elgin in 1860, where 300+ perished). Nor was the storm where she perished the most savage (254 men and 16 vessels were lost in a November 1913 storm). About 550 wrecks have been recorded in Lake Superior, with at least 200 of those occurring in the 80 miles between Munising and Whitefish Point, Lake Superior's "Shipwreck Coast."

NOVEMBER 9TH, 5:00 PM. -- At 767 feet long, fellow ore steamer Arthur M. Anderson dwarfed even the Edmund Fitzgerald's 729 feet in length. The past tense there, by the way, is due to the Fitzgerald only. Anderson continues to ferry cargo to this day, although even it has been surpassed by the lake's thousand-foot behemoths. Anderson and Fitzgerald attempted to stay near each other through the anticipated storm, with the Fitzgerald taking wider turns deliberately so that the Anderson could keep up with it.

The two ships also determined to follow each other taking a more northern, storm-appropriate long way around Caribou Island, which would provide some cover from the harshest northerly gales.

NOVERMBER 10TH, 2:45 PM - The last anyone saw of the Fitzgerald was surprisingly early, a fact I feeI feel gives a sense of the severity and relentlessness of this storm. We should avoid the temptation to say that the Edmund Fitzgerald could have been saved if word of the storm had been more urgent. Gale warnings were first issued at 7:00 PM on November 9th, then upgraded to a storm warning at 2 AM. At 1 PM on the 10th, the Fitzgerald passed just 11 miles away from a safe harbor at Michipocten Island. The Coast Guard issued its emergency order to anchor at 3:35 PM - an order that freighters could, of course, ignore if they so chose. Great Lakes shipwreck historian Frederick Stonehouse has argued that it's unlikely the Fitzgerald would have stopped anywhere but Whitefish Point, even if she had been warned earlier: "These vessels work a very tight schedule. They're supposedly built to punch their way through heavy weather."

Although the Edmund Fitzgerald still appeared on radar, by the time the snow and fog conditions cleared up enough to reestablish visual contact (between 7 PM and 8:30 PM on the 10th), the Arthur M. Anderson could see only the lights of three nearby ships, the Avafors, Nanfri, and Benfri. This was one of the first tip-offs that something had happened to the Fitzgerald. It was the Anderson that convinced the Coast Guard to launch a search for the Fitzgerald.

NOVEMBER 10TH, 3:20 PM. -- The Edmund Fitzgerald takes damage to some of her radar equipment, although she's still able to radio in to the USCG and the Arthur M. Anderson. Fifteen minutes later, the Coast Guard issued its emergency bulletin for all ships to seek anchorage immediately. According to the Anderson's testimony of communications received, the Fitzgerald said she had taken damage to some of the topside vents, and was traveling with a "list." Little more specificity than this is provided. The ship's captain, E.R. McSorley, is a 44-year veteran of lake- and ocean-going vessels. At around 5 PM, Captain McSorley tells another nearby freighter, the Avafors, "I have lost both radars, and am taking heavy seas over the deck in one of the worst seas I have ever been in."

It would not have been unusual if the Edmund Fitzgerald kept the extent of her damage hidden. "[T]he captains say very little to each other," according to Stonehouse. "If a captain is in trouble and sinking, certainly he'll say so. But if he just has problems" - even problems that could compromise his ship - "[...] and he doesn't feel his vessel is in any real danger, he's not going to tell anyone. [...] He's not going to spread his problems out over the airwaves."

NOVEMBER 10TH, 4:52 PM. -- By no means were these the highest winds on Superior that day; winds greater than 80 knots, or 100 mph, were recorded at both the Soo Locks (where Superior connects to Huron) and the Mackinac Bridge (running between Michigan's two peninsulas).

The ships around Caribou Island were being regularly buffeted by waves as tall as 25 feet. Encumbered as she was, the Fitzgerald would have been taking the top twelve feet of those waves into her cargo hold. One explanation for the sudden disappearance of the Fitzgerald is that it was hit by rogue waves - the so-called "three sisters" phenomenon of Lake Superior. Captain Cooper of the Arthur M. Anderson purports to have spotted three thirty-five waves headed in the Edmund Fitzgerald's direction just before the disappearance.

However, this theory is improbable, as it probably would've taken out other ships as well.

NOVEMBER 10TH, 7:10 PM. -- And those ironic words were the last she spoke.

You have probably noticed that I did not include "The Edmund Fitzgerald sinks" as an event in this list of events relating to the sinking. We do not know exactly when she sank - only that she did so quickly and without warning or call of distress. Some hypotheses put the wreck immediately after her 7:10 PM contact, and some as late as 9:30 PM. We also do not know why she sank. Gordon Lightfoot's ballad perfectly captured the lack of closure: "She might have split up or she might have capsized,/She may have broke deep and took water." There have even been books published claiming that an alien abduction is the only way the spontaneous disappearance can be explained.

Please note that it was at least POSSIBLE for the ship to have sank within minutes or even seconds, though it is certainly possible E.T.s have an insatiable zeal for taconite. We can also say that, since routine inspection ten days before her voyage found no abnormal damage to the Fitzgerald, theories that she split or capsized have basically been ruled out. Finally, let us acknowledge that there is little reason to put any responsibility on any of the crew for their demise, nor did Captain McSorley appear to act negligent in any way.

The Coast Guard's official explanation is that several hatchways were not closed properly and thus allowed water to enter. Compounding this was the fact that the ship was already heavy with ore and taking water into her cargo hold. Yet according to her radio communications, the Fitzgerald was only running two of her six pumps to clear water. It is possible that she was concealing the extent of her problem, but it is also likely that she did not realize the extent of the flooding she'd undertaken. (Shockingly, although the technology to detect such water intrusion existed, the Fitzgerald had no such equipment.) If this theory is true, then the topside damage would have to have some other cause - a floating log or a piece of equipment above deck coming off - and McSorley would have to have chosen not to spread alarm about the damage.

The other strong explanation is that the ship had "broke deep" against a shoal, probably the Caribou Shoals or the Six Fathom Shoal which surround Caribou Island. This would have required the ship to have gotten a few miles off-course, but under the circumstances this is not unlikely. It is also possible that if the ship had broke deep, she would not have realized it, assuming she'd simply smashed against the surface of the sea. In the positive column, it would not only explain the topside damage but the peculiar type of damage Fitzgerald suffered. One sailor whose account is given in Stonehouse's book says that he had never seen water alone break a ship's railing, but that a jolt to the middle of the boat would have bowed the railing outward and snapped it off, consistent with what we see.

Either explanation is consistent with the postmortem facts. The Fitzgerald sank with very little flotsam being recovered - nothing but a few shreds of lifeboats and a life preserver that had been abovedeck. And she sank without any other ships noticing, any distress call going out, or any of the ship's safety equipment being touched. In fact, it is unlikely her disappearance was noted as early as it was.

NOVEMBER 10TH, 8:25 PM. -- At the approximate time the Edmund Fitzgerald sank, the Coast Guard was primarily concerned with the whereabouts of small skiffs less than 20 feet across, and urged the Arthur M. Anderson to aid in its search for these small craft. The Anderson, on the other hand, was the first to notice that the Fitzgerald had disappeared from radar. As the storm cleared, only three sets of lights were visible to the Anderson, none of which could have been the Fitzgerald.

Only after the Anderson's second contact with the Coast Guard did search efforts for the Fitzgerald begin proper. According to Stonehouse, "If the Anderson had not reported that they thought the Fitzgerald was gone, the Coast Guard might not have missed her to this day." The problem, then, was what the Coast Guard could actually do. The Edmund Fitzgerald vanished near Whitefish Bay, the far western point of Lake Superior. The nearest boat which could actually brave the waters and attempt a rescue was in Duluth - a neighbor to Superior, WI, where Fitzgerald had departed - at the EASTERNMOST edge of Superior! Meanwhile, even men moored in lifeboats would have struggled to survive the exposure to Superior's harsh elements.

To effectuate a rescue, therefore, the Coast Guard requested the assistance of several commercial vessels. The Arthur M. Anderson, which had reached the relative safety of Whitefish Bay, turned around at 9 PM to re-enter search the area where the Fitzgerald had sank. A total of ten other ships were asked to join the Anderson's search. Most refused, scared off by the brutal storm. Only two dared to do so: the American William Clay Ford and the Canadian Hilda Marjanne.

The Coast Guard has faced criticism for its involvement with the wreck of the Fitzgerald - not because of how it responded, but because of how it was able to respond. Besides its request to commercial ships to turn around and search on their behalf, the Coast Guard was able to deploy a HU-16 airplane and a helicopter to the scene by midnight on the night of the wreck. Whether either aircraft could have done much is doubtful. Aerial rescue would not have been possible, and at best these would have been able to locate the sinking Fitzgerald (if the ship had not gone down as quickly as she had).

The ship sent to retrieve the Fitzgerald was a 180-foot buoy tender called the Woodrush - the only rescue ship anywhere in the vicinity that could brave the storm, if you could call Duluth "the vicinity." It arrived in the area a full day afterwards. The other watercraft which the Coast Guard dispatched, a 110-foot cutter called the Naugatuck, had to be repaired before it could be sent out, and only arrived at the scene at 12:45 PM on the 11th. At the time the Fitzgerald wrecked, the fleet of vehicles the Coast Guard had access to included nothing that had been built after World War II. In addition, the comms equipment used by the USCG was also inadequate. The radio beacon at Whitefish Point had routinely gone down for three years preceding November 1975, and was out the night of the wreck!

One of the Coast Guard's magnetic surveys was able to locate the probable spot where the Fitzgerald sank by November 15th. Despite this, it was not until spring of the following year that a cable-controlled submersible called the CURV-III confirmed that this was the Edmund Fitzgerald. In spite of their willingness to conduct the surveys days after the wreck, USCG blamed the harsh fall storms for the delay in searching.

Did this delay have any consequences? Indeed it did: it has literally muddied the waters surrounding the cause of the wreck. Most of Superior's lake bottom is mud, and so this delay allowed most of the bottom of the hull - which would have conclusively shown the shoal theory to be true or false - to disappear forever into the lake.

The continued public fascination with the fate of the Edmund Fitzgerald owes much to a six-minute folk song written by Gordon Lightfoot, who'd grown up along the banks of Lake Ontario. Two weeks following the wreck, Lightfoot was apparently saddened by the lack of coverage the story was receiving. (He claims to have seen the Associated Press writing about the "Edmond" Fitzgerald, but I could not find the original story to confirm this.)

And what a difference the song made on that score! As the song is exposed to more generations, it seems that its popularity has only grown in recent years. Lightfoot said he repurposed the melody from an Irish funeral dirge. In spite of its doleful origins and length, the song was a surprise charting success, reaching no. 1 in Canada and no. 2 in the U.S.

Although these and many other recommendations were made in the immediate aftermath of the Fitzgerald investigation, these things have a way of taking their time before being implemented. Many standards were made more stringent, including the requirements for "freeboard" (that is, the amount of ship above the water line), inspection requirements, and the requirement to install survival suits. On the other hand, some of these requirements have been criticized as misdirection. It is certainly true that survival suits would have done nothing to save the Fitzgerald's crew, who had not even time to put on life jackets. It is also true that these survival suits were available long before the Fitzgerald sank. The urging of the Lake Carriers Association to install hull-monitoring systems, which could have detected a breach caused by shoaling, also distracts from *their* lack of regulation for large ships to have depth-monitoring equipment, which might have avoided shoaling altogether!

Reassuringly, the most outrageous systemic safety oversight was corrected first. It is true that nothing, not even survival suits, could have saved anyone on the Fitzgerald the way it happened. But the wreck may not have happened at all, or it may have been forestalled long enough to get a distress signal out, had she been equipped with any way to estimate the depth of the seas below her. In fact the only way the ship could estimate the depth was, literally, dropping a piece of lead on a rope into the water and seeing how far the rope went. The worst part? An electronic sounding system could have cost less than $500. By 1977, Coast Guard regulations required electronic depth sounding equipment for every vessel weighing more than 1,600 tons.

Fans of the song will remember that the bell at the Mariner's Church of Detroit (recorded as a "musty old hall" in Lightfoot's song - he revised this for live performances when he found the church to be quite comfortable) "rang twenty-nine times, for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald." Why, then, was the number increased to 30 on May 3rd, 2023? It was to commemorate the death of Gordon Lightfoot, who died two days earlier. Nearer to Lake Superior, at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy in Traverse City, Michigan, the bell is annually rung thirty-one times: for the twenty-nine crewmen, for Lightfoot, and "once for all lives lost at sea" (according to the local 9 and 10 News).